Sunday, March 21, 2010

Back to mainframe?

After the micro revolution when 8 bits machines revolutionized the IT, IBM and Microsoft did an excellent job in democratizing the PC platform. It is without doubt them who made possible and affordable the personal computer.Now after about 30 years the mainframe is striking back again. It's new incarnation is now the cloud. I agree that clouds are beneficial for some situations - but pushing more and more from desktop to cloud will have some unexpected consequences on the long time. The one I fear the most is the lack of privacy - the contents of the cloud can be easily controlled by some organizations while they cannot do anything to your PC's disk if it is well protected from the net. Also one can be easily tracked down in the cloud. I am quite sure that the internet was not really meant for this. Internet was meant for collaboration and openness over standards, not for greedy takeover of user's data. On the long time the server market will divide between a couple of strong producers and a couple of strong buyers because most of the clients will buy cloudware instead of increasing their CAPEX to buy hardware. This is not beneficial for the market nor for the final user as the result might be not the most adapted to its needs. Also the applications will evolve quite strangely and they will rely on the cloud more and more. The fun of low-level programming will go away.